Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (17 page)

The West was immersed in crisis. The young people in Germany fought and lost with the ‘Auschwitz generation’. Berlin was still a combination of ruins and voids. Fashion creators experimented with the soldier look. War was in the air. Electronic music evoked a reality, that was gritty, grey and concrete, scary, an uncontrollable modernity that we couldn’t quite master – and geographically, that was Eastern Europe. The land of SF’s dystopian visions. In 1972 Tarkovsky premiered
Solaris
, his metaphysical meditation over modernity, with weary-looking Soviet people in cars driving through menacing cities full of flyovers, freeways and austere, concrete blocks. This was the reality of the post war Europe as such. Joy Division needed an estrangement factor to clarify their vision: the Holocaust, totalitarianism - but they grew up in a very similar reality to their Eastern peers. Both of them lived in industrial areas, which developed their own proletariat, attached to their machines until Thatcherism came. Some of the Sheffield groups, like Richard
Kirk of Cabaret Voltaire had been fellow travellers of the CPGB. Membership was also a windup towards the conservatism of parents, as in the case of Green Gartside, who named his band after Gramsci’s
Scritti Politici.

British subcultures in the punk era, between mid-70s and 1989, were especially cast against the rest of the West, fascinated and stimulated by the totalitarian East. Much of that was prompted by a similar experience of the war. Born to a large degree in the 1950s, the main personnel of punk grew up in amongst ruins and rubble of the war and the post-war austerity. At this time traces of WWII were still everywhere, not only because now we had the Cold War. Ian Curtis collected books about the Third Reich and was obsessed with an idea of an underdog in the totalitarian society. They got their name after the pulp Nazi camp fiction,
House of Dolls.
Joy Division’s ‘They Walked in Line’ can evoke equally the broken citizens of any totalitarian state. Yet the fascination with the Soviet Bloc by the disillusioned 70s generation already had nostalgic undertones. Vic Godard of the Subway Sect got obsessed with the Bloc after a trip to the Soviet Union, covered his room in Soviet posters and colored everything in grey, The Human League made the punishing, machine music
The Dignity of Labour
(1979) about the Soviet space programme and put Yuri Gagarin on the sleeve – and of course Joy Division were originally called Warsaw.

2.12 Wielkanoc 1988 photograped by Mirosław Stępniak

The proto-Ostalgie in the untamed cultural expression of the 70s and 80s punk, post punk and new wave may be misleading, because just as much the bands were obsessed with the underdogs behind the Curtain, the East in their view was a land that
overlapped with quite a lot of the West as well. A lot of this ‘Ossie’ sentiment was a Westalgie, commenting on the dream of the Welfare State that they were about to lose.

“Everyone says Joy Division music is gloomy and heavy. For me it was because the whole neighbourhood I lived in was completely decimated in the mid-60s. At the end of our street there was a huge chemical factory” – says Bernie Sumner in a Jon Savage interview - “there was a huge sense of community where I lived. I remember the summer holidays when I was a kid. What happened in the 60s is that someone in council decided that it wasn’t very healthy and something had to go and it was my neighbourhood that went. We were moved to the tower block. At the time I thought it was fantastic: now of course I realise it was an absolute disaster.” Sumner and Co had a real experience of “collapsing new buildings” (or, as they say in German,
einstürzende neubauten
). Via the obsessions of their leader, they started putting them into this extremely sombre music, which, with double irony, affected people incredibly in Eastern Europe. The so-called cold wave started to emerge across the Bloc, with similarly sinister vocals and nihilistic lyrics. Sumner: “By the age of 22 I had quite a loss in my life. I understood that I could never go back to that happiness. It’s about the death of a community and a childhood. The music was about the death of optimism, of youth.” Bands from the industrial areas – soon to be deindustrialized - seeing its deprivation, were becoming ‘engaged’. “We had so much aggro going on” – says Peter Hook. It wasn’t the metropolitan youth, but those from deprived areas, which made music that resonated. There was a general sense of nihilism – and in this sense, it was close to certain really dark right wing ideologies. Part of punk is to examine this dark side of humanity. Savage: “Punk is primarily libertarian, anarchistic – and as oppositional to the power of its day, the late social-democratic consensus, it marked the end of an era.” Curtis liked bohemian modernist writers like Ballard and shared Bowie’s fascination with Burroughs. The sleeve of the first Joy Division single ‘An Ideal for Living’
featured a Hitlerjugend boy drumming and a child from the Warsaw ghetto. Curtis even made his wife sing a hymn to the tune of ‘Deutschland Uber
Alles’
on their wedding and was obsessed with the film
Cabaret.
“For me it was about World War Two, because I was brought up by my grandparents and they told me about all the sacrifices people had made (…) we had a room upstairs with gas masks, sand bags and English flags, tin helmets. The war left a big impression on me, and the sleeve was that impression. It wasn’t pro Nazi, quite contrary. I though what went on in the war shouldn’t be forgotten so that it didn’t happen again.”

Joy Division were English boys for whom the end of the world as they knew it resulted in bleak fascination with the other side: people under totalitarianism, with whom they felt a secret affinity, making music as if their world was their own. But it also worked the other way round. The morbidity of their music hit exactly the emotions disaffected young people felt behind the Curtain. The extent to which Polish fans identified with Curtis’s cold-war nihilism can be seen in the reaction to his death: the leader of the punk band Bexa Lala hanged himself, also after watching Herzog’s
Stroszek!
I’m not sure what is more moving about this scene: the literality with which the singer took his own life after his idol, or the fact even the final moment of somebody’s life, the final truth, could’ve been to this extent copied from someone else, someone who was to the guy like a film star, no doubt. I wonder if they realized Curtis life wasn’t that dissimilar to their own?

By the late 70s and especially in the 80s, the era of the ‘Second Cold War’, the post-war austerity became a club décor in the New Romantics mecca, The Blitz. When in 1979 a group of future Blitz frequenters made their visit to Berlin, what they really couldn’t wait for was to get smuggled to the East. As it was deadly cheap, they went to the revolving restaurant in the TV Tower and ordered the most expensive dishes in the card, champagne and caviar, later
dropping by to the Palast der Republik for a cocktail and ending up eating other people’s buffets, after which, attacked, they comment, “You’d think the Germans would’ve learned by now!”

The idea of ‘Europe’ within the popular music culture was very new, and has a direct relation to the Cold War. Before, pop and rock bands straightforwardly identified themselves as American. Arguably the first band to openly identify themselves as European were Kraftwerk. But by the 80s, synthesizer bands spread across Britain because the cold sound of synthesizer was the most straightforwardly identified as the sound of the future, it was evoking the industrial or post-industrial dystopia, because the future realized itself exactly according to some of the SF dystopian visions. And where else could this idea could develop better than in the land of George Orwell?

Today many of the ambitious pop bands from the 70s and 80s are likely to be put under the label of ‘post-modernism’, where postis clearly being confused with the clearly ‘neo’ approach of the renewal of the lost elements of modernity. It wasn’t a gesture of ‘ending’, but the reverse, of reopening. Kraftwerk, by calling themselves simply ‘power plant’ risked ridicule and ostracism in a hippie-driven culture of early 70s. But their plan was to restore the belief in technology, in a growingly schizophrenic world, in which, although technology was ever expanding, the public acknowledgement had increasingly become an obscurantist fear and anti-modern neglect. It was the legacy of the ambivalent 60s, where the modernist ideas of housing and living were bravely introduced into life. ‘Europe’ as a fashionable object is also an effect of the mutual isolation, best expressed by the Berlin syndrome.
Trans-Europe Express
was a hope that once Europe was this much more organic structure, but now, if we’ll have the technology, finally, the
Europe Endless
, or rather a certain dream of it, can become a united organism beyond divisions.

The
FACE
magazine was the bible of the new pomo aestheticism of the 80s, with the ever-whimsical, period defining graphic design
by Neville Brody, borrowing from all avant-gardes, yet capturing something true about it, even if it is an authentic of inauthenticity. In 1983 they ran a special ‘European’ issue, with an article on Vienna describing it as tired, decadent and bourgeois, but noted its avant-garde, Actionists and kitsch postmodern architect Hans Hollein (but no mention of Ultravox!, who made Vienna fashionable), pictures from Milanese and Roman jet-setting, and erratic design works run alongside reportage about
Ulrike Meinhof’s Children
, her two daughters as well as a metaphorical one, Christiane Felscherinow, in a typical shallow-deep combination. Yet, there’s very little on any of any Soviet Bloc countries. The Wall was where this interest stopped. We shouldn’t underestimate the real political borders. Yet, the
FACE
remained a product much mythologized and desired, of high demand on the Moscow black market, where old copies could go for as much as 80 smuggled dollars. This paradox of desire and not being able to have it, is most painfully addressed in a UK Levi’s commercial from 1986, in which in a scary sotsrealist hall the 50s rocker-looking delinquent is being searched on the occasion of smuggling Western goods, by the scary looking Soviet customs inspectors in fur hats. They discover an issue of the
FACE
, but not the trousers, which he enjoys in his socialist tenement. Even the lettering of the commercial is in Cyrillic, yet it’s all a fake: the tenement is Robin Hood Gardens in east London, the sotsrealist hall the Royal Horticultural Hall in Westminster - and of course such a “subversive” commercial would never run in Russia, where it would actually have been subversive.

The East must’ve been perceived as universally grey, unattractive and scary, yet, when Thatcherism was taking its toll in the mid-80s, The Style Council, Paul Weller’s next outfit after mod-revivalists The Jam, came to Warsaw to shoot their clip to ‘Walls Come Tumbling Down’, as an act of solidarity with the persecuted Eastern folk, and the class war in the UK, in the midst of the miners strike. The effect is interesting – we see the musicians, stylishly
dressed (or so Weller boasted) in the grey streets of Warsaw, with footage emphasizing the somberness of the Stalinist Palace of Culture, the monument to the Soviet Soldiers and the sheer roughness of the everyday life: shabby trams, poor people, greyness. But the whole clip is interspersed with the band playing for a small enthusiastic crowd in Jazz Club Akwarium, with radiant faces, modernist design and actually everything against the stereotype.

We are Depechists the same way others are communists, or fascists
– says one of the Russian fans in the DM-mania devoted documentary by artist Jeremy Deller, incidentally blocked by the band itself. In Russia and Germany, the band had a fanatical following, which was a separate subculture. Depeche, vaguely dwelling on various elements that could’ve been identified with the Soviet regime (underdogs, master & servant, heavy industry), especially in
Construction Time Again
, toyed with workerist visual imagery, along with a critique of capitalist production and perils of selfish, ruthless competitiveness in songs like ‘Everything Counts’. Recorded in the Hansa Studios, mythologized by Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy, with recording sounds resembling the everyday toil of the factory in a
musique concrete
fashion, the songs were centered around endless, hollowing labors which, as in ‘Pipeline’, not only sound like workers poetry: ‘Taking from the greedy/giving to the needy/working in the pipeline’, but also touch on socialist realism: ‘From the heart of our land/to the mouth of the man’. In the last song of the album they even suggest to the world’s revolutionaries, to tear up the map and start all over again, yet, in the end, it’s again just to serve individuality. If there’s a revolution, then it’s pathetically self-centered, Thatcherist self-reliance, not more than an ad slogan: ‘All that we need at the start’s universal revolution (that’s all!)/and if we trust our hearts, we’ll find the solutions’. Yet, Depeche brought solace to millions of fans especially in the Bloc,
who, as we can see in Deller’s film, found alternative communities, where they dreamt of a better future.